Will Unwound

• Don’t be high maintenance.  As a boat rocker, you’re going to make enemies.  As a change agent,  staff and management will be wary of you.  People hate change.  Don’t exacerbate things by being emotionally high maintenance.  Try hard not to be a diva or drama king. 
• A sense of humor is mandatory.  Nothing diffuses tension at a staff meeting like a little self deprecating humor.  It’s an art form.  Practice it.
• Hold the name calling. Many boat rockers love to launch a very derogatory arsenal of insults at their status quo targets.  Eliminate words like “moron,” “idiot,” “dummy” and “chucklebutt” from your vocabulary.
• Learn to take a punch. Your detractors are going to come at you from all different directions, mostly from behind your back with their electronic weapons.  They will get on twitter, facebook, and friendfeed to take shots at you for the benefit of their social media friends.  Learn how to take a punch or in religious parlance learn to practice the fine art of turning the other check.  This will drive your critics crazy.
• It’s not about you.  These changes you want to make in the library?  Are they about your ego or are they about service to the patron?  Be honest.  If it’s all about you or mostly about you, you need to do some serious meditating and get your priorities straight because if it’s about you, you deserve the term “toxic.”
• Check out Dale Carnegie.  Right, Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is so 1950s.  It’s also a classic.  Its lessons are timeless.  Read it.  Then read it again.  And again.
• Remind your boss of your interview.  In your interview you told your boss that you would always speak your mind.  When your boss begins to shut you out because you are a pain, remind him/her about your interview session.
• When you win your boss over to your point of view don’t gloat to the rest of the staff.  Never, ever get on Twitter and say WINNING!
• Don’t threaten to resign every time a decision goes against you.  It gets tiresome and sooner or later your boss will say “Okay, resign!”
• Don’t embarrass your boss or a co-worker in public.  This is a big no-no unless you have an organizational death wish.  If you have a disagreement please, please, please do not air it in front of the library board, or God forbid, the City Council. This includes using social media tools to be, umm, unsociable.

Okay, by now if you are a boat rocker, you’re probably thinking, that my advice is meant to defang you.  It may seem that way because boat rockers by their very nature are supposed to be rude, condescending, and contemptuous of people of lesser intellect (which is pretty much everyone).  No, I’m not trying to declaw you like you are a fierce feral cat.  I’m actually trying to tell you how to get things done and here’s a little secret: the boat rockers who were most successful with me would get me in my office, close the door, and tell me that I could really look good in front of the library board and city council if I were willing to make some very needed changes.  “Will, I’m trying to keep you from getting canned” was always very effective.

This is the time of year when it is traditional to give advice to graduates.  If you scan the internet you will find all manner of important people giving commencement addresses to college graduates. 

Then if you shift over to library blogs you will read posts and comments that offer helpful hints to MLS graduates.  Most of this advice is very good.  It usually centers around resumes, interviews, and getting that first job.

What you don’t run into very often at this time of year, however, is advice to the people who are doing the hiring of the newbies.  It’s definitely an overlooked area.  I think the conventional wisdom is that if you are a hiring authority you don’t need advice.  Your career has progressed to the point where you have proven your skills, your talents, and maturity. Actually, the truth is everybody needs help in hiring.   

What is the most common mistake that managers make when it comes to hiring?  That’s easy.  They hire inside their comfort zone.

Most managers are smart enough and experienced enough to know that they should hire their weaknesses.  That’s just a self preservation thing.  If you’re not a tekkie, you definitely need some tekkies around you.  If you are a tekkie, you need some customer service specialists around you.  If finance and taxation is not your thing, overlook the person with the library background and go for the person with the business and finance expertise.   It’s not rocket science.

What is more difficult to understand is the importance of hiring people who have the courage, integrity, and the chutzpah to speak truth to power.  Unfortunately, this is precisely the person that most managers shy away from.  They want what is usually referred to as “team players.”  The term “term player” is often, not always, a code word for someone who will not rock the boat. 

There is a great temptation to hire nothing but team players.  Believe me I know because I’ve been there and done that.  It took me a long time to realize that a staff of nothing but team players will take you to an acceptable level of mediocrity and keep you there.  Actually, that’s a fairly attractive place to be especially in these times of slashed budgets, divisive political environments, and constant technological changes.  What’s the old adage?  It’s better to be safe than sorry.

But if you want to go beyond comfortable, mediocre, and safe, you need smart people on your staff who will tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear.  They will also nag you, step on your toes, and ruffle your feathers.  If that’s not enough they will create enemies on staff who will refer to them as “troublemakers.”

The truth is, especially in libraries, we need boat rockers.  The problem does not lie in finding them.  I can give you the names of five library bloggers right off the top of my head who would make splendid boat rockers.

The problem is finding managers with the courage to hire them and the skill to keep them from turning the boat over.

Here’s a chicken and egg question for you: Which came first – the belief in an afterlife or the belief in God?

You can go all the way back to the Neanderthals to find the existence of funeral rituals.  Why did early man reverence death?  Why did so many ancient cultures see death as the beginning of a new journey into an afterlife?

I don’t know the answer to these questions but since 1977, I have been developing a theory.  That was the year when a landmark bestseller by Raymond Moody entitled Life After Life came out. It racked up hundreds of patron reserves in the little library where I worked.  Today we can look back at Life After Life and see that it was the seminal book that has spawned a great deal of research on the subject  commonly referred to as NDE – Near Death Experience. 

In near death experiences people are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down upon themselves (they might be in a hospital operating room or at the scene of an accident or some other place where they have collapsed).  In most NDEs this is followed by an otherworldly meet up with a deceased relative or close friend and is often accompanied by a feeling of warmth, love, and euphoria.  A life review is also an integral part of the experience.  Finally, the ring of light is another phenomenon that is often witnessed by these subjects.  It beckons the newly deceased forward to another world, but for a variety of reasons the soul returns to the body and resumes our earthly life.

The near death experience, although it has been documented as an experience that literally millions of people have had, has its share of skeptics.  Many people feel that it is the hallucinatory effect of trauma.  Others feel it is a self fulfilling vision especially among deeply religious people.  Still others believe it is an illusion created by an evil spirit.

Dr. Jeffrey Long, a highly respected radiation oncologist, addresses these theories in his new book Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.  I read the book last night and simply could not put it down.  His book differs from many books in the NDE literature because of the very impressive amount of quantitative research he has done on the subject.  While I am pretty sure that this book will not change anyone’s mind about the subject, I will say that it greatly strengthened my own belief in the validity of the near death experience.   Previous to reading the book my strongest belief in NDEs came from sitting up with a dying person.

Dr. Long, however, transcends anecdotal experience, and from his extensive research he draws several very interesting conclusions: NDEs cut across all age groups, races, cosmic belief systems (including atheists), and cultures.  The other very interesting point he makes is that across this wide spectrum of diverse persons the NDEs are very similar even the life review component. 

Finally, I was struck by the number of experiences that involved the soul floating to a variety of vantage points inside and even above the hospital itself.  This is important because the research shows that what the soul witnessed in other parts of the hospital (while the body was in the operating room) was corroborated by third parties who were not aware that an NDE had even taken place.  In one experience, one woman reported seeing a tennis shoe on top of the 10 story hospital roof.  A quick follow-up showed that  there was indeed a tennis shoe exactly where she said it was. 

So back to my theory:  If near death experiences are commonplace today especially with people who previously did not believe in God, my guess is that NDEs were commonplace in prehistoric and ancient times…ergo the belief in an afterlife and a belief in God.

Your thoughts?

I am in the middle of reading a most interesting history book.  It is by Amity Shales and is entitled The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.

The longer our Great Recession drags on, the more interested I am becoming in the Great Depression.  Here we are:  a country mired in war, massive debt, rising annual deficits, 3 endless and expensive wars halfway across the planet, catastrophic climatic destruction, an increasing dependence on foreign oil, a phobia about religious terrorism, and a hopelessly high unemployment rate.  That’s all on a national level.

On a personal level, folks are worried about how the shenanigans of the Wall Street masters of the universe will impact their 401k accounts, how low their property values will dip, how badly Social Security and Medicare benefits will be cut, and when the layoffs will stop.

Does anyone have any good news?  Certainly not librarians who optimistically but wrongfully hope that this will be the year without any new budget cuts.

Here’s what surprises me: why isn’t anyone talking about radically new ways to configure society?  Oh, you might suggest that the Tea Party is a new voice on the political scene but is it really?  My reading of the Tea Party is that it is focused on preserving traditional American values by protecting individual property rights, lowering taxes on individuals, and drastically cutting back on government entitlement programs.

Why are the socialists sitting this one out?  In the Great Depression, according to the The Forgotten Man socialist intellectuals and admirers of the great Russian experiment in the 1930s flocked to the Roosevelt administration and helped create the programs that the President hoped would lift the country out of the dormant economy.  They created a great deal of optimism and excitement in a country that was searching for a way out of the doldrums. 

In the most fascinating part of the book, the author discusses in detail a trip that many of the future architects of the New Deal took to Bolshevik Russia to view what was happening in the grand new scheme of collectivization and central planning. Their focus was on what was in the best interests of society as a whole.  They felt that when you provide for the common good you provide for the individual.  That’s why they were so intrigued with the emerging Soviet model.  Their idealism blinded them to the dark side of the Communist “dream,” but even so they were irrepressibly idealistic.

Where is that approach today?  Where is our sense of social innovation and where is our priority for the common good over the rights of the individual.  You would think that if this country were ever to create a fresh new approach to the concept of the commonweal it would happen now.  But it’s not happening.

The last time we tried was in the 60s when young people questioned the values of the governing establishment.  Yes, that counterculture movement fizzled out in the mid 70s, but it did leave a residual sense of idealism that seems now to have completely eroded.

Why?

• Want an active public library?  Make children’s services your first priority.
• Need to get more adults in your public library?  Make children’s services your first priority.
• The key to securing funding in a public library is a strong and vocal board of trustees.
• Cataloging used to be the foundation of the library profession.  I.T. is the new foundation of the library profession.
• 99% of what librarians write concerning library advocacy is counterproductive.
• The less patrons cook, the more they want cookbooks.
• Librarians are mystery lovers because they are information detectives.
• Autocratic management only works in libraries during a crisis and then for only about 25 working days.
• Library staffs should mirror the racial composition of the library’s user base, but rarely do.
• The best kept secret about the library profession is that it embraces change with enthusiasm and expertise.
• Readers need weeders (except for my books).
• Patrons who challenge books should not be scorned because they are exercising their First Amendment right to petition their government.
• If the American Library Association ceased to exist, many library bloggers would be in a panic about what to blog about.
• More than any other group, vendors push the library profession in the direction of change.
• No one on the library staff likes pot lucks but everyone pretends to like them.
• Donuts vanish quicker than any other food in the staff lounge.  Health snacks sit and wilt.
• Library staff members who splatter the staff lounge microwave and then don’t clean it up should have their microwave privileges suspended for a month.
• The real reason Harper Collins has put a 26 circ limit on their e-books is because they are petrified of their future.
• Finger puppets are superior to hand puppets in putting on children’s programs.
• Children still love felt board presentations.
• There should be a two year ban on powerpoint presentations at library conferences.
• The best library science book ever written is The Joy of Cataloging by Sandy Berman.
• The best part of retirement is the afternoon nap.

Now it’s your turn Unwinders.  Boris is giving out one free drink coupon for every 3 “This I Know” comments that you come up with.

In yesterday’s post I challenged readers to come up with an obsolete technology that is still in mainstream use.  There were a lot of good comments, but the answer that intrigued me the most was B. Barcode’s assertion that the pen and pencil are still widely used.

Yes, there are still many written communications that are most conveniently implemented with a pen or pencil.  When do I use a pen or pencil?  After wracking my brain here is what I came up with:

• Doodling at long stoplights.
• Addressing envelopes.
• Recording my daily diary.
• Playing tic, tac, toe with my grandchildren.
• Writing checks.
• Leaving notes for myself on yellow stickies (dude, did you remember take your bp pills?)
• Signing books that I have written.

That last bullet point may have you a bit stumped since I haven’t written a book in 15 years.  Well it actually happened twice in the past week.  At my last speaking engagement I actually signed two copies of Snowballs in the Bookdrop.  Neither occasion did much to bolster my ego.

The first was for a librarian who thrust the book into my hands, congratulated me on its “wit and wisdom” (I’m pretty sure she hadn’t read any of it), and asked me to address it personally to her.  I opened it to the title page and immediately discovered that I had already addressed it to a man named “Harold.”  I looked at my admirer and said “but it’s already signed to someone else.”  Without hesitation she said that she bought the book on ebay for a dime because it was cheaper than the unsigned copy which was selling for a quarter.

The second one was easier to decipher.  It was a library copy that was stamped “WITHDRAWN” in four different places. 

How flattering.

When I look at the world in the mid 1950s when I was a youngster and look at the world now I see two major streams of change: social and technological.  Has any American generation gone through as much change as we Boomers have?

Today, let’s consider the technological change.  Some other day we’ll tackle social change.  Let’s start by going room by room in a fairly typical American household:

Kitchen

• 1955 – home cooked meals by Mom standing over a hot stove and oven.
• 2011 – meals are replaced by “whatevers” prepared by whomever with the microwave.
• 1955 – party line telephone connected to short cord (long cords came later).
• 2011 – many homes going phoneless in deference to mobiles.
• 1955 – squatty, heavy fridge with tiny freezer section
• 2011 – big unit with automatic water and ice functions and huge freezer to store microwavable foods.

Living Room

• 1955 – 18 inch black and white television set with vacuum tubes and 3 stations.
• 2011 – 5 foot  3 D high def plasma screens with 300 stations

Student’s Bedroom

• 1955 – desk with manual typewriter
• 2011 – ipad
• 1955 – little library of books including basic ref set
• 2011 – ipad
• 1955  – record player with smattering of lps and 33s
• 2011 – ipad
• 1955 – Playboy magazine hidden between mattresses
• 2011 – ipad

Rec Room

• 1955 – albums of family photos
• 2011 – ipad
•  1955 – ping pong table
• 2011 – ipad
• 1955 – fully stocked bar heavy on the whiskey
• 2011 – fully stocked bar heavy on the vodka

Utility Room

• 1955 – washer/dryer combo in harvest gold
• 2011 – washer/dryer combo in creamy beige

Garage and Driveway

• 1955 – the family car, a ’56 chevy wagon
• 2011 – Imported SUV, imported four door, gm pickup truck, Prius (to decrease the carbon footprint)

For me that was fun.  I am sure that I have missed a few things and would appreciate having you fill me in but for the most part I think I got it right.

Clearly, the area that has not changed is in the laundry room other than our color tastes have improved.  And things are not all that much different in the garage.  We are still guzzling gas, more now than ever.  Every other area of our lives has changed pretty drastically.

I bring all this up to raise an issue that I see being debated from time to time in library blogs: Do obsolete and new technologies ever co-exist and if so for how long?  I am not talking about eccentrics like myself who still use fountain pens.  I am talking about obsolete technologies that still constitute a viable business opportunity for a budding young entrepreneur. 

Personally I can’t think of any.  Ours is a society of out with the old and in with the new.  It’s pretty abrupt and pretty unsentimental.  Do we wax nostalgic for reel to reel tapes and 8 tracks?  Not for very long.

Remember when the card catalog bit the dust?   There were some sentimentalists who wanted it to coexist for a while with computer catalogs. Never happened.

Today the conventional wisdom is that paper books will coexist with e-books.   What do you think?

Before you decide: read these two links.  If I were still a practicing librarian I would contemplate these two articles at length.  Very interesting…very disturbing.  I’ll let you decide: 

• http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp?PID=35699
• http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/05/20/general-specialized-consumer-services-us-barnes-amp-noble-buyout_8477391.html

Things on the Unwound comment board became, well, a bit unwound with last Sunday’s post.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  In fact I think it is a very good thing for the future of this blog. 

One Unwinder mentioned that he thought that there was more heat than light in the post and in the comments.  I also don’t think there is anything wrong with that either. Heat indicates passion, and passion indicates a tenacious commitment to a point of view.  It’s a measure of the depth of feeling on a subject.  My sense is that heat sometimes communicates more than light and that it is good to have conversations from time to time that provide more heat than light.  Sometimes warmth is more important than illumination.  Sometimes heat provides all the illumination you need.

To those of you with misplaced priorities who chose to devote your Sunday to other pursuits than monitoring the comment board on Will Unwound, I believe what sparked the furor was the surprise I expressed that atheism, a belief system in a materialistic, naturalistic, and inevitable creative process in which the universe came into being and continues to evolve, creates real opportunities for existential joy , a transcendent meaning, and a higher purpose.  Until Sunday, I will admit, that I felt that the belief in a godless, indifferent universe would inevitably lead one into a Sartrean sense of being and nothingness.  I quite frankly equated atheism with philosophical nihilism.  This clearly shows I took way too many philosophy courses in college and haven’t spent enough time talking about the meaning of life with atheists.

So…I learned something Sunday, and I am glad that I did because I believe that a search for joy, meaning, and purpose ironically enough, is precisely what distinguishes humanity and makes us unique.  What is this restless quest that we humans have to find a higher meaning in our lives than just staying alive?  For me, the source of this quest comes from our spiritual dimension, which is commonly referred to as the soul.  Many of you may not believe in a soul and in our age of scientific materialism that’s actually a very normative point of view especially in higher education.  I respect your belief.   But I also respect and appreciate your willingness to share in your quest for life’s meaning, because for me that is very affirming of my own perspective of the universe.

If you haven’t noticed, I am intrigued with cosmic belief systems…the entire continuum from atheism through agnosticism through pantheism through spiritualism through “new age” and all the way through institutional orthodoxy.  In fact, if I could start college all over I would probably major in world religions.  Houston Smith and Karen Armstrong are two of my favorite authors.

The problem with pursuing this subject area, however, is that it often, as the commenter suggested, creates more heat than light.  We shall see from Sunday to Sunday how things shake out.  We are members of a profession whose core value is intellectual freedom.  If any group of people should be able to discuss any subject freely, openly and even aggressively, it should be library people.

My final note is that I think that librarians are in the people business, more so now that technology has become so dominant in our working lives, and so I believe people crave the human touch.  This means we need to understand a very wide diversity of people and I truly believe that understanding one’s cosmic belief system is integral to understanding the person.  I’m a huge believer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Peace and please, Boris, a cup of chai tea.

It strikes me that in the traditional books vs. e-books  debate, we readers might not have a choice.

Last year my retirement fund told me that I would no longer be getting my monthly statement in the mail.  I had to access it on-line.

Ditto for Social Security.

Ditto for my mortgage payment.

Ditto for my pension check.

Everything is going on-line.  You don’t get a choice even if you’re willing to pay the forty cents for a snail mail stamp.

Why do we no longer have a choice?  Simple…$$$$$$$.

Now, you tell me which is cheaper to make - a book with real covers and real paper or something that appears on a glass screen?  Of course…the e-book is cheaper. 

I don’t think there is a very big profit margin with traditional books to begin with.  Borders tanked and so have many independent booksellers in the Great Recession.  Barnes and Noble is basically all that remains for walk in book retail.  Why?  Barnes and Noble came up with the Nook.

That leaves Amazon as an on-line retailer, but interestingly enough Amazon is reporting steadily  increasing e-book sales.

My guess is that publishers may be approaching a tipping point where it may no longer be profitable enough for them to produce traditional books.  Even just a 10 percent drop in sales may render their profit margin just too small to continue with their traditional business model.

Then you will get the proverbial letter in the mail: “beginning with next month your monthly statement will only be accessible at www.dealwithit.com.”

There are several things about the faux rapture that strike me as significant:

• Harold Camping, the man who predicted that the rapture would occur today, made a similar prediction about the end of the world in 1994.  I don’t remember one little jot or tittle of media ink being wasted on this nonsense back then.  This shows how much the world of news, rumor, innuendo, and gossip now work.  Something gets posted on the internet; it goes viral; folks either take it to heart or ridicule it; and  then it dies a quick death only to be supplanted by, I don’t know…maybe new rantings by Charlie Sheen or new revelations by Arnold.  That’s how the internet works – like a global gossip grapevine.  The really depressing part, however, is that the mainstream media feels the need to feed off this giant vine of vituperation and report on it as though it is a legitimate news story.  Are there no editors with an ounce of common sense working anymore?
• The atheists are having a field day with this nonsense.  They are now saying things like “I told you there is no God.  This fiasco proves that religion is based on myth, superstition, and pseudo science.”  Here’s where I am confused: if you are an atheist what do you care what other people choose to believe?  Is it me or is atheism becoming, well, very evangelical? Atheists, please explain something to me: your cosmic belief system is that life has no meaning but is the result of purely accidental naturalistic processes.  So if life has no meaning, why are you trying to give it meaning by broadcasting your belief system?  Every time an atheist starts proselytizing I become more firmly convinced that life does have a meaning.  It turns out that God has a wonderful sense of irony!
• What I object to most of all about the faux rapture is the word “rapture.”  It creates the impression that religion is all about creating peak emotional states in which we come face to face with God.  Personally, I haven’t met too many religious people who have experienced a metaphysical ecstasy.  But I have met a lot of religious people who have felt a sense of fulfillment in working in a soup kitchen or ministering to the marginalized. My experience is that following the dictates of a religion is a struggle filled with sacrifice, doubt, disappointment, despair, discipline, self restraint,  prayer, communal worship, and soul searching meditation.  It ain’t about rapture. Amen.